A few years back, we celebrated the tenth anniversary of Fun Fun Fun Fest, the event’s final go round with its original producers before Graham Williams and much of his crew broke off and started Sound on Sound Fest. To mark the occasion we complied a comprehensive oral history of the fest.

Folded into the tales of battles with the city, rock star divas and French onion soup, was this little gem about from 2008. At the time, FFF Fest was a rag tag event produced on a shoestring budget in Waterloo Park. Producer Graham Williams felt bad about his event displacing the homeless people who made the park their year round residence, so he hired some of them to work as his grounds crew.

It was the first year the festival included comedy and they were excited to welcome the Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job. And then this happened.

Max Gregor: (Tim and Eric) were awesome but also kind of a disaster. There was a box of their merch that was delivered to festival grounds and somehow it was dropped off literally in the middle of the park. Just a box sitting on the ground … while we were building. It was kind of like 60 feet away from the stairs that led up to the merch area so I think people that saw it were like, “Oh that’s somebody who’s setting up merch.” For a couple days it sat there.
So finally we opened up the doors for the festival and people came through and a few hours later Tim and Eric show up and they’re like, “Hey, it’s kind of crazy but there’s just tons of people wearing our merch everywhere. Have you been selling a lot?” And we were like, “Your merch?”Rosa Madriz:All the homeless folks. They left it out … and everyone who was helping clean the park was wearing all their merch around the park.Max Gregor: Tim Heidecker was standing there as I was having this conversation with his manager being like, “Yeah it all must have gotten stolen and it was our fault,” and the manager trying to be super cool about it … with the artist just standing there silently. Just staring at me. Like what a (expletive) idiot.Later Adi Anand, who then worked at now-defunt website the Austinist, interviewed Tim and Eric in a swank little lounge area set up by Prototype Vintage.Adi Anand (Director of client services): (They) got super fired up in their characters and one of the Prototype chairs was flipped over into the creek behind the (lounge). I had to go down and like bargain with some of the folks who lived in the park who claimed that to be their new furniture.